acidaura____Acid aura______AcidaurA
cutstoic____Cutstoic_______CutstoiC
andichar____And I char,____AndIchaR
unumbero___U number, O,___UnumberO
sarcasms___Sarcasm's______Sarcasm'S
tighttit_____Tight tit_______Tight tiT
inmeandi____In me and I____InmeandI
coldstic_____Coldstic.______ColdstiC

Thusly, more or less, allowing that some people can actually use HTML?

Three+ edits for formatting.

Hmmm... I'm not sure that works any better now that I see it. Sorry, this is pretty far from my usual areas of knowledge. (Ask me about hyena sexuality or how to make cider! I rock at stuff like that!)

I come from a strange world where poetry is as much meant to be heard as read. I'm always impressed as hell by clever multi-level things, but my brain is saying "Cool sounds."

I come from a strange world where poetry is as much meant to be heard as read.

I see that- it's probably why I'm struggling so much with this.

Glad for your opinion, Theodosia. Tell me about hyena sexuality some time!

I think my problem was that for days I was trying to read it as "acaustic acrostic", like some version of autistic or acoustic-- until tonight just after skating I went oh! A caustic acrostic.

But I could just be Stupid Reader.

Me stupid reader too.

I even looked up "acaustic" to see if it meant "not caustic".

I suspect it's not stupid readers, it's me trying to be too clever. It doesn't really work, does it?

Hey, everyone. I need some help with this grad school essay. Stuff that I know needs work: I need to cut the number of characters by more than half. The opening can probably be a lot shorter, but I'm not sure what to cut out. I'm switching between formal and informal style a lot, and I need to settle it somewhere. I'm not sure how to conclude it. I'm not really sure how well I'm "selling myself": Berkeley is my absolute first choice school, but my grades and test scores just put me at borderline levels for acceptance, so I need this essay to show that I really want to go there and that it would be a really good idea for them to accept me, and I'm not sure that it's doing either one of those terribly well. (Edit: be brutal. I'm pretty sure this essay needs to be torn apart several times before it'll be done.)

While doing research at the REU at Cal Poly this past summer, I worked on a progam in Maple to produce Mahonian statistics for various placement rules. I had worked out programs for most of the simple rules, but the more complicated ones gave me trouble. One Friday afternoon, I figured out how to get the program to run properly. I started inputting some numbers as the variables, and I generated a fairly large table of output. My partner and I spent a few hours analyzing this data, and we came up with a few conjectures based on the patterns we saw. Some of the patterns we saw were approximately what we had expected, but others didn’t seem to make much sense.

My partner and I discussed the problem over dinner. I commented that the numbers just didn’t make sense. I went over the algorithm for the program in my head, trying to figure out why that process was producing those numbers. Then I realized: the algorithm I was considering actually wasn’t the one in the program. I’d included an incremental in one loop when it should have been in a different one. The data we had been analyzing all afternoon were completely invalid.

I decided that I’d take some time over the weekend to work out the flowchart for the program, and then fix the code Monday morning. I finished the flowchart by Saturday night, and figured that I’d take some time off to go into town on Sunday. Sunday morning, though, I realized that I couldn’t just let the incorrect program and data sit on the hard drive when I knew how to fix it. I went to my office and corrected the code, then ran enough input through to have a fairly good output table and a conjecture to discuss with my partner and our advisor Monday morning.

I think that that sort of drive to make things work and make sense is why I am so interested in math. I love the feeling of completing a proof and getting all the variables to fall into their proper places, and I’m willing to work hard and puzzle over things until I can figure them out.

One of the reasons that Berkeley is my first-choice school is the option to concentrate in Foundations of Mathematics and the strong logic program. The course that I’ve found the most interesting as an undergraduate was a graduate-level course I took in mathematical foundations of science. My first-semester project for Senior Seminar deals with lattices and order, and I plan to base my second-semester thesis on some topic in foundations of math. Also, I have been president of the Tulane branch of Women in Science since sophomore year. I’ve appreciated the support structure this organization created, and I’ve tried to have at least one program dealing with women in mathematics each year, so I would be very interested in being involved with the Noetherian Ring.

Just to make it clear, Hil, your piece starts with the line

While doing research at the REU

is that right?

I think it'd be a good idea for anyone posting their pieces here, if it's not incredibly obvious, to say STARTS HERE or something like it. Maybe even make any piece be a separate post.

[EDIT: Aha, your edit makes it clear!]

Also, you need it cut by half?

My first thought is, who's going to be reading this? Because me not knowing much about math and not knowing anything about the educational institutions, this sentence:

While doing research at the REU at Cal Poly this past summer, I worked on a progam in Maple to produce Mahonian statistics for various placement rules.

contains 27 words, six of which are meaningless to me. It might as well read "While doing mahonian programs at REU Poly I wrote a placement in Cal" for all the difference it makes.

But if the intended audience understands them, and they contribute to your story, just ignore me.

I think the central point of your story, as narrative, is the bit where you can't bear to take Sunday off when you know you can get hold of the good data. That's the key point, so cut around that.

As someone who knows Nothing-with-a-capital-N about math, but spends a lot of time reading stories and essays, I'd say the story in the first five paragraphs needs to be cut drastically, and the hook-- the point-- of the essay, which currently occupies only the last paragraph and therefore comes across as almost an afterthought, needs to be moved up and made longer.

t edit xposted with John, who says all good things.